Thursday, March 19, 2015

Report from "Speciation 2015" and announcement of lab-meeting on landscape genetics

Posted by Erik Svensson

I am posting this from Ventura in southern California, where I am currently attending the last day of the "Speciation 2015" Gordon Research Conference (GRC).It has been a very stimulating conference of perfect size (about 100 attendants), and it will hopefully be permanently established as a bi-annual GRC-event after evaluation of the first two conferences (this one, and the next one to be held in 2017). In spite of the fact that speciation has been an extremely hot research topic in evolutionary biology over the last decade or so, I feel that I have learned many new things, met new colleagues in the field and have established some useful contacts and potential collaborations in the future.

I really hope that in the future, EXEB-members in mine, Jessicas or Tobias groups will participate in these exciting and informal meetings, which will either take place in California or on other GRC-locations (Spain, Italy, Switzerland or China). The location of the next meeting is yet to be determined. You can see the whole programme for the conferencehere, and I will also briefly tell you a bit about my impressions and thoughts on the lab-meeting next week (see further below). I was responsible for being "Discussion leader" for the "Behavioural Mechanisms"-section, and it went very well, I think.

For lab-meeting next week, we will have the chance to listen to Rachael Dudaniec, who will summarize her postdoctoral research on landscape genetics and genomics of the common bluetail damselfly (Ischnura elegans). This is work that she has done here in Lund under the supervision of me and Bengt Hansson in MEMEG. Rachael has now obtained a permanent lecturer position in Australia and will move there by the end of March 2015, and this will be the last chance to hear about her research while here.

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About us

We are a group of evolutionary biologists consisting of three PI:s (Jessica Abbott, Erik Svensson and Tobias Uller), and several postdocs, PhD-students and Master's students. We focus on ecology and phenotypic evolution, and topics as sexual selection and sexual conflict, epigenetic effects, frequency-dependent selection, and speciation processes in natural populations.

Research approaches include experimental evolution, quantitative genetics, experimental field studies of natural and sexual selection, and phylogenetic comparative methods. Our main study organisms are mainly invertebrates (insects, isopods, flatworms), although we also study lizards and birds.